No need to convince me that sending dirty con back into the flotation process (somewhere) is a bad idea from several points of view but a few posters kept saying that back when the dirty con topic was active here. I like to give them the benefit of the doubt but I responded to their posts by saying that the tuning of the process must have the proper conditions presented (no recirculating dirty con) or the tuning would be a waste of effort. There was a slight chance imo that the flowsheet and "modern" engineering with computer controls could accommodate recirculation con so I didn't know enough to declare it a definite bad idea. I would have expected that dirty con to be routed back to the first flotation tank but maybe a point after most of the tailings have been taken off, not to the head of the line before the mills.
So, I can talk myself into believing that the dirty con can be retreated and still allow the overall process to be tuned up. The percent solids in some of the tanks is quite high, around 25% so what's a few more percent of the good stuff.
Anyway, recirculating the con is not done imo. No sense continuing that line. That leaves all that dirty con out in the wind and rain. At $1.60 a pound, it's hardly worth the effort to cover it if it's going to get loaded on an uncovered rail car soon enough.
If you're chasing the total amount of ore taken from HT since GO, consider this spreadsheet-derived cause and effect: if they milled 90 tph for 100 days (which is still below their soft start goal), they should have 6800 tons of con, some dirty, and we know where that is, and some clean. I'd guess that perhaps 1000 tons are in the SX waiting line so there should have been at least 10 500 ton lots ready to sell.
This would have consumed 216,000 tons of ore and would have left almost that many tons of tailings to stockpile near where the SX plant will be.
I'd say it's stored somewhere and since it's not worth stealing except as corporate sabotage (as some posters would suspect! I'd like to hear reasons why any more than a souvenir cupfull would be wanted by anyone.), it can be in almost any barn or shed in the area now that MD has demonstrated that, for the magnetite, he's made arrangements with a local for a place to store and load.
Are the locals surveiling the mill traffic at 3 am?
The mill process, the mill engineers, and the corporate consultants could not have missed doing classic copper flotation by such a degree that only one or two saleable 500 ton lots have been accumulated by now. It's a simple flowsheet by comparison with others, but whatever aspects may be state-of-the-art but somehow don't work right won't kill the throughput to that extent, imo.
I think we will all recognize the joke when we hear the punchline and I hope we hear that punchline very soon.
AI
